Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, critic, and essayist from southwest New South Wales.

Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887-1961 (2010, Presspress) won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, 2010. The manuscript for her first novel, Purple Threads (UQP), won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Indigenous writer in 2010; and was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Westerly, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Jeanine has published widely in Aboriginal literature, writing otherness, literary critique, and creative non-fiction.

She was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019); and was the 2019 recipient of the Red Room Poetry Fellowship for her project called Voicing the Unsettled Space: Rewriting the Colonial Mythscape. Jeanine taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne from 2016-2023. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowship for a project called ‘Aboriginal Writing: Shaping the literary and cultural history of Australia, since 1988’ (2014-2018); and a second ARC grant that looks at Indigenous Storytelling and the Archive (2020-2023).

In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books. In 2021 she was the recipient of the School of Literature Art and Media (SLAM) Poetry Prize University of Sydney for an unpublished book-length collection of poetry, called gawimarra gathering. In 2023, Jeanine was the winner of the David Harold Tribe Prize for Poetry – Australia’s richest poetry prize. Gawimarra, gathering was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2024.